Topping up with mature players... Will we regret this in a few years?

Ok, so we’ve picked up Chappy and Cooney, and Fletch and Licha are going to go around again. These guys should all be best 22, though there is genuine competition for their spots, so some kids will be missing out on development opportunities.

The basic gamble is that these players give us our best chance of winning a flag in either 2015/16, but if they fail then we might look back when they are gone and wish that NOB/Stein/Jerret/Gleeson/Browne had another 30 games under their belts.

I guess this “top-up” policy has been somewhat dictated to us by the sorry saga. Lack of high draft picks, plus the desire to give the fans some immediate success before they lose interest. Getting guys like Chappy and Cooney to the club also show the general public that we can’t be hated all that much.

These guys are good for bigger crowds, more members and media opportunities, plus their leadership and experience is highly valued.

Fletch reaching the 400 milestone will be a valuable legacy for the club, and Licha leaving for Richmond would have looked bad. I think Licha might have been saved by the draft pick issue.

In any case all of these decisions to have these players go around in 2015 make sense individually, it’s only when you look at all 4 of them together it seems like we are working to a top up policy.

I guess the next question is, what level of success needs to be achieved for it not to be considered a failure? Winning a final won’t make it a success, though demanding a flag is probably asking a bit too much. I think if we can win a prelim, people will be hard pressed to say we did the wrong thing, but anything short of that and I think there will be many highly critical of our list management.

you can’t analyse it though we simply had no choice.

well you can but its futile, what else could we have done, trade mediocre players for picks in the 50s+?

No.

No.

We recruited 4 players who should each play 100+ games for the club. Langford, Laverde, Long and McKenna. Thats pretty good.

Look for a strategy of resting Fletch. He may only play 8-12 games this year. It will depend on injuries and matchups.
Other players to be rested every 4-5 games depending on injuries: Winders. Chappy, ■■■■, BJ, Stanton

This will give plenty of options for younger players to come in and get games under their belt.

Someone should be forcing me out of the Blitz team, too.

I’m not sure the top up policy came at the expense of draft picks. I think the guys who would have been at risk of being cut if the draft penalties hadn’t applied would be Browne, NO’B, Dalgiesh etc, and probably we wouldn’t have taken Gwilt. Maybe Winders might have been let go if we had a good replacement.

But we’re clearly going for a premiership, and that often comes at a cost to development. But every team faces that issue. If Freo fall apart as their aging talls go, will people say they should have started a rebuild early? If Geelong collapse in the midfield with no Christenson/Varcoe and an ageing premiership group, will people say they should have traded out players and started developing? If we get to a grand final and miss ala what happened with St Kilda, is that a failure?

Personally, I think we need to go for it now and should be in the spot to make a challenge if we can keep key players on the park. The talls specifically. So I say “go for it”, and if it doesn’t work out that’s the way the cookie crumbles. But with the age demographics on the list, you have to go for it now or develop for about 4-5 years down the track. I want to go now.

A reply to: @chris_64 regarding QuoteLink

No.

We recruited 4 players who should each play 100+ games for the club. Langford, Laverde, Long and McKenna. Thats pretty good.

Look for a strategy of resting Fletch. He may only play 8-12 games this year. It will depend on injuries and matchups.
Other players to be rested every 4-5 games depending on injuries: Winders. Chappy, ■■■■, BJ, Stanton

This will give plenty of options for younger players to come in and get games under their belt.

[i]Should[/i]???

Gumby should have made 200. Hislop and Jetta went for 18 and 20, pretty similar to Laverde and Langford, and hardly impacted. Kav was #19, Pears early twenties. The idea that 4 players out of 5 drafted should make it (3 drafted in the rookie draft) is pretty optimistic. And would be an amazing draft.

nope

A reply to: @Ants regarding QuoteLink

I'm not sure the top up policy came at the expense of draft picks. I think the guys who would have been at risk of being cut if the draft penalties hadn't applied would be Browne, NO'B, Dalgiesh etc, and probably we wouldn't have taken Gwilt. Maybe Winders might have been let go if we had a good replacement.

But we’re clearly going for a premiership, and that often comes at a cost to development. But every team faces that issue. If Freo fall apart as their aging talls go, will people say they should have started a rebuild early? If Geelong collapse in the midfield with no Christenson/Varcoe and an ageing premiership group, will people say they should have traded out players and started developing? If we get to a grand final and miss ala what happened with St Kilda, is that a failure?

Personally, I think we need to go for it now and should be in the spot to make a challenge if we can keep key players on the park. The talls specifically. So I say “go for it”, and if it doesn’t work out that’s the way the cookie crumbles. But with the age demographics on the list, you have to go for it now or develop for about 4-5 years down the track. I want to go now.

Personally I think the topping up we’ve done is good all round. If you have too much focus on development you can develop a losing culture. Our kids might get limited game time but when they do it will be alongside guys who have played in grand finals and know how to dominate at the highest level. Basically if they can’t get a game, it’s because they aren’t as good as a Chappy or a Cooney or a Gwilt, I think this is better than “we are gifting you games because you’re in a sh*t team”.

I don’t think Freo or Geelong topping up will backfire for them, they have had a heap more success than us in recent times. Topping up when you’re a top 4 side is a bit different to topping up when you barely make the 8. And if we make the GF like the Saints then no way are we going to think we weren’t good enough to have been topping up.

If we continue to scrape into finals in 2015/16 then questions will be asked, and I gues we’ll be blaming ASAGA and not the list managers, who didn’t really have a choice. It’s a good point you make about N.OB/Browne/Dagliesh being beneficiaries out of the loss of draft picks, you can probably add Pears to that list too.

As for Chris’s 100 game comment, if those players play 100 games then I can only imagine how many games the picks under them will play. It will probably be 2019 before they pass 100 games combined, so we wo’nt know for a while.

A reply to: @chris_64 regarding QuoteLink

No.

We recruited 4 players who should each play 100+ games for the club. Langford, Laverde, Long and McKenna. Thats pretty good.

Look for a strategy of resting Fletch. He may only play 8-12 games this year. It will depend on injuries and matchups.
Other players to be rested every 4-5 games depending on injuries: Winders. Chappy, ■■■■, BJ, Stanton

This will give plenty of options for younger players to come in and get games under their belt.

thats being a bit optimistic

i think its been good to get some mature talent into the club, ■■■■, goddard, giles definately have something to offer the club

giwlt is OK if he is purely used as back up

jerrett played a fair few games last season and hopefully will get a few more, same goes for gleeson, should play some games regardless irrespective of the older players at the club… dont think either are ready for consistent game time yet, so its no big deal that they wont be getting it IMO.

browne is coming off an ACL and has a history of injuries, so its a bit odd to suggest that an older bloke shouldnt be at the club so that browne can get games…

chap and winders… eh dunno, yeah chap had that contract trigger clause thing so i guess that made him locked in for 2015

surprised winders is at the club tbh… body is shot, no absolute certainty as to his position, even farking conceeded he wasnt up to it anymore… just dont understand how he’s still here

i guess you could say recruiting the older players will be a failure if they dont perform to a level that younger players can perform + their development… a premiership is a longshot, so you have to lower your expectations of what the senior players are there to do… if they can instil a professional mindset on the youngsters and pass some of their tricks of the trade onto them, then ill be quite content

zerrett could learn a lot from chappy, gleeson could learn a bit from winders, laverde and hepp could learn buckets from BJ, zaharakis and melk could learn from the ■■■■. These are the lads that are going to lead the club to the next premiership tilt after (i guess) the one we are currently experiencing, and theyre learning from some of the best.

fletch sticking around should never be in question. plays as long as his body allows him to play at a good enough level.

A reply to: @Ants regarding QuoteLink

A reply to: @chris_64 regarding QuoteLink
No.

We recruited 4 players who should each play 100+ games for the club. Langford, Laverde, Long and McKenna. Thats pretty good.

Look for a strategy of resting Fletch. He may only play 8-12 games this year. It will depend on injuries and matchups.
Other players to be rested every 4-5 games depending on injuries: Winders. Chappy, ■■■■, BJ, Stanton

This will give plenty of options for younger players to come in and get games under their belt.

[i]Should[/i]???

Gumby should have made 200. Hislop and Jetta went for 18 and 20, pretty similar to Laverde and Langford, and hardly impacted. Kav was #19, Pears early twenties. The idea that 4 players out of 5 drafted should make it (3 drafted in the rookie draft) is pretty optimistic. And would be an amazing draft.

Yeh, but its all lid off in the off season isnt it?

I think the answer is … maybe.

The draft penalties in 2013 left us with a choice of two equally uninviting options. I’ve posted this analogy before, but our choice was between betting the house on a pair of sixes (topping up with older players for a flag run and hoping everything goes right) or folding with two pair kings high (accepting that the Watson/Goddard/Stanton generation will never see a flag and starting a rebuild, in the full knowledge we won’t be contenders for another 4-5 years minimum and even then we can probably expect the expansion teams to be fully mature and winning everything)

We’ve definitely chosen option a, and while I can’t say it was the right decision i can’t say it was wrong either. A flag would require EVERYTHING to go right for us (which it hasn’t so far), but on the other hand, a rebuilding phase on top of the Saga would have hurt the club’s membership base, financials, and probably would have seen players leave as FA for opportunity in finals, while not actually helping very much because we’d still be locked out of top draft picks - well, penalties are penalties because they were meant to hurt the club, after all, and they (and the people who imposed them, the people who promoted them, and the people who accepted them) succeeded spectacularly in achieving that end.

Anyway, personally I would have given Gwilt a miss and gone with another young development tall, but that’s really just tinkering around the edges. I’m pretty confident our young midfield stocks are good enough in the post-Chappy/Jobe/Winders/Goddard/Cooney era - Heppell is Heppell, hitting the Zerrett pick out of the park really helped our position last year, and guys like Zaka and Colyer still have an awful lot of footy in them, and that’s before we even talk about the unproven blokes from Laverde to Long to Browne to Kav to Kommer to Dalgleish. In fact, one of the silver linings to our lack of talls is that we have so much young midfield depth on the list that simply by law of averages SOME of them have got to come good! I expect retirements will be staggered - Winders will 90% likely last only one more year, so might Chappy, while Jobe and Goddard still seem to be pretty close to the top of their games, so no hurry there and we will be able to give young guys some greater exposure, though perhaps not quite as much as i’d ideally prefer.

We have some very good young talls - in fact most of our spine haven’t yet reached the halfway point of their careers and the long-term future looks good there as long as things don’t go wrong - depth is a real worry, but tbh when you’re gambling it all on a pair of sixes, you just have to cop that sort of thing.

But of course what throws all this out the window is free agency and the new ‘contract, what contract?’ era of player/club employment relationships. It arguably matters less now than it ever has before how well you’ve structured your list, cos you can just go buy the players you want to fill your gaps in the offseason. We’ll be a bit limited in our ability to do this for a while - with the big-$ FAs like Goddard, plus Cooney would be on a fair wage, plus Heppell, Carlisle, Daniher etc will be looking for big raises next time their contracts come up and none of our likely retirees would be on huge money - we might be a little squeezed for salary cap space for a bit. It’s not a solution I’m particularly fond of, both because I hate trading/poaching season with a passion and would prefer to grow our own, and because when you bring in an established player (if you can convince him to come over) you pretty much always have to pay over the odds. But it’s a reality now and remains an option.

Never a bad idea to bring in good players.

If the young kids are any good, they’ll force their way in. Don’t hand them spots, make them earn them. That way they respect it more, and they’ll earn more respect.

It’s a case of damned if we do…damned if we don’t.

The pressure supporters, members and sponsors place on success leads to making decisions to get there as soon as possible.

The other alternative is to bottom out well and truly.

At least we haven’t gone full Voss.

@wannabe , it helped me to separate our list into two groups.

The free agents group, and then the rest. The rest of our list looks quite normal apart from Fletcher (may he play forever). It’s the free agents group that has thrown out our lists age.

The thing with the free agents group though is that as long as you are competitive, you can continue to top-up that group. It would not surprise me to find us with 4 spots cycling through the best free agents we can put together. Goddard / Cooney / Chappy (although he wasn’t FA I think the same principle applied). It’s a fair list so far.

I’ll agree that Gwilt felt a strange pick-up. But as HM stated, it’s tinkering.

As long as these additions don’t cost us our top end draft picks, then we can top-up, and rebuild at the same time.

But yes, in my opinion we have a very small window. But given the ASADA debacle we needed to give the players hope of success, or the results would have been different. While I am very pleased that the players have stood by each other, and give them full credit, I also acknowledge that the impact would’ve been very different if we were sitting at the bottom of the ladder. We are a shot here, make no mistake. #17 in 2015.

I think it all depends on the young guys we DID draft if the 3 L’s and mckenna fulfill the potential they have then no regrets because we still have the future
If we thought the guys you mentioned could have had an impact in 2015-16 then i think we would have taken fringe/depth players as top ups for the list

I don’t think so. Obviously circumstances dictated our approach to a great degree, but I think we were fortunate in that our list of up and coming midfield prospects looked, and looks, pretty good. History will be the final judge, but unlike other eras there seem to be a good crop of youngsters waiting to ripen. Assuming that will be the case I would suggest they’ll be coming into their maturity in the next 2-3 years, which is when some - or all - of the top-up players will be retiring. In the meantime they have the time to develop and learn amid some of the bigger names in footy like Goddard, Chappy and Cooney.

Had we opted instead to top up through the draft we would have likely had a logjam of young prospects. Among other things I think it allows us to put some quality development into those prospects.

The only caveat to that is that at least some of these prospects must develop into 100+ game players for us. That should happen, but isn’t guaranteed. My only other concern is our stock of key position players. Very skinny there, and something that will have to be addressed this year.

Yes.

I guess we will have to wait and see how much the older players are actually used in 2015.

We might find they are somewhat wrapped in cotton wool which would still enable a heap of development.

I think we’ll see Licha and Chappy get rested quite a bit, and Fletch will be handing over the reigns.

Gwilt might not even get a game until stocks dwindle, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I’ve said this before, but I think with Hird returning as coach we could see a few changes to what we are used to, a few surprises. Not so much by who is selected, but who misses out. Could be some big names playing VFL this year.

And besides, despite the top-up players, we will still have at least 3 blokes developing in the fwd line in Carlisle/Daniher/(Ambrose/Giles/Laverde?/Hams??), as well as guys like Gleeson and Stein sniffing around the backline, plus Hurley is still improving as a defender.